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Stable as a rock. Xfce PulseAudio Plugin hit a new stable milestone with the 0.4.0 release. This release wraps up the awesome development cycle we’ve had on this over the last few months and is recommended for all users.

Xfce Settings 4.13.2

It’s here, it’s finally here! The first 1.0 release of Parole Media Player has finally arrived. This release greatly improves the user experience for users without hardware-accelerated video and includes several fixes.

What’s New?

Parole 0.9.x Developments

If you’ve been following along with the stable release channel, you have a lot of updates to catch up on. Here’s a quick recap. For everybody else, skip to the next header.

Parole 0.9.0 introduced a new mini mode, boosted X11 playback, and made the central logo clickable. When your playlist is complete, the “play” logo changes to a “replay” logo.

Parole 0.9.1 improved support for remote files and live stream playback. Older code was stripped away to make Parole even leaner and faster.

Parole 1.0.0: New Feature, Automatic Video Playback Output

We’ve finally resolved the long-standing “Could not initialise Xv output” error (Xfce #11950) that has plagued a number of our users, both in virtual machines and on real hardware.

In the past, we were delighted when we were able to implement the Clutter backend to solve this issue, but that API proved to be unstable and difficult to maintain between releases.

Now, we are using the “autoimagesink” for our newly defaulted “Automatic” video output option. This sink provides the best available sink (according to GStreamer) for the available environment, and should produce great results no matter the setup.

Activity is slowing down as the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin matures and heads toward the 0.4.0 stable release. With some usability refinements and bug fixes, users will find the latest release both easy and convenient to use.

I’ve got some great news for fans of Catfish, the fast and powerful graphical search utility for Linux. The latest version, 1.4.4, has arrived with performance improvements and tons of localization updates!

This has been a comparatively quiet development cycle for Xubuntu. With increased development on Xfce as we prepare for Xfce 4.14, less Xubuntu-specific changes took place this cycle. Thankfully, there are still plenty of goodies to get excited about.

Appearance Updates: Greybird‘s client side decorations (CSD) have been refreshed and now consume much less space. elementary-xfce, our preferred icon theme, has been updated and includes new device, mimetype, and panel icons. And we have a fancy new wallpaper.

Application Updates: This is the first release of Xubuntu to feature GNOME Font Viewer, a handy tool for font management. LibreOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird have been updated to their latest versions (5.4, 56, and 52.4 respectively). On the Xfce side, Dictionary, Genmon Plugin, Mount Plugin, Exo, and Tumbler have been updated to take advantage of the latest GTK+ version and continue the march toward Xfce 4.14.

Screenshots

Download

Download Xubuntu 17.10 from Xubuntu.org. It’s available in both 32-bit and 64-bit varieties.

What’s Next?

After the release festivities calm down, work will begin on Xubuntu 18.04, our next LTS release. These are always our most active cycles as we polish the work that we’ve been doing the past 18 months and prepare for a 3-year support window. A few things we already have planned…

Replacing the Sound Indicator with the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin, a very capable replacement with more features landing soon.

Replacing the Xfce Indicator Plugin with the Xfce StatusNotifier Plugin, a fully compatible and better maintained plugin with a few new tricks.

A new release, some handy new features! But, I’ve never posted about this plugin before, so we’ll start with a proper introduction.

Xfce PulseAudio Panel Plugin

This is a plugin for the Xfce panel that allows the user to easily adjust the audio volume of the PulseAudio sound system. As of the 0.3.0 release, this plugin was extended with support for controlling multimedia players via the MPRIS DBUS interface. And with this latest release, users can now easily toggle the default audio input and output devices.

Features

Control device volume, from 0% to 100% and beyond

Instantly mute volumes by middle-clicking the plugin or clicking the mute toggle

Launch the configured audio mixer

Open, raise, or control playback from known media players (since 0.3.0)

Select default input and output devices (since 0.3.1)

Screenshots

Downloads

The latest version of Xfce PulseAudio Plugin can always be downloaded from the Xfce archives. Grab version 0.3.1 from the below link.

With a huge code cleanup effort, complete plugin development documentation, and numerous bug fixes, Parole Media Player 0.9.2 paves the way for future development. What’s New? General Homepage updated to docs.xfce.org Xfce URLs were switched to HTTPS New Features A new keyboard shortcuts helper was added to the Help menu New and keybindings for previous … Continue reading Development Release: Parole 0.9.2

Xubuntu 17.04 “Zesty Zapus” was released on April 13, 2017 with several fresh Xfce GTK+ 3 releases, bug fixes, and new features in tow. What’s New? Several Xfce panel plugins and applications have been ported to GTK+ 3 Core Xfce libraries exo and libxfce4ui have been updated with full GTK+ 3 support Greybird and Numix were … Continue reading Xubuntu 17.04 “Zesty Zapus” Released

Here we are again, folks. After six more months of development (two years since the last LTS), we’ve got another fantastic release — Xubuntu 16.04 LTS “Xenial Xerus”! I wanted to find a nice squirrel quote, but it seems most folks have a horrific dislike for the little critters. — Myself, after looking up squirrel … Continue reading Xubuntu 16.04 LTS “Xenial Xerus” Released